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Thomas Coryate
Thomas Coryate (?1577-1617), also Coryat or Coryatt, was an English poet and traveler. He is considered by many to have been the 1st Briton to do a Grand Tour of Europe; a practice which became a mainstay of the education of upper class Englishmen in the 18th century. Life Overview Coryate was born at Odcombe, Somerset, and educated at Westminster and University of Oxford, then entered the household of Prince Henry. In 1608 he made a walking tour in France, Italy, and Germany, walking nearly 2,000 miles in 1 pair of shoes, which were, until 1702, hung up in Odcombe Church, and known as "the thousand mile shoes." He gave an amusing account of this in his Coryate's Crudities hastily gobbled up (1611), prefixed to which were commendatory verses by many contemporary poets. A sequel, Coryate's Crambé; or, Colewort twice Sodden, followed. The next year (1612) Coryate set out on another journey to Greece, Egypt, and India, from which he never returned. He died at Surat. Though odd and conceited, Coryate was a close observer, and took real pains in collecting information as to the places he visited.John William Cousin, "Coryatt, Thomas," A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910, 95-96. Web, Dec. 29, 2017. Youth of Coryat's Crudities, 1611.]] Coryate was the son of Gertrude and Rev. George Coryate (rector of Odcombe, Somersetshire). He was born in the parsonage house at Odcombe, about 1577.Jessopp, 259. He was entered at Gloucester Hall in the university of Oxford in 1596. He left the university without taking a degree, and appears to have led an aimless life for a few years. At court On the accession of James I, Coryate became a hanger-on of the court, picking up a precarious livelihood as a kind of privileged buffoon. Gifted with an extraordinary memory, and being no contemptible scholar, with what Fuller calls "an admirable fluency in the Greek tongue," and a certain sort of ability which occasionally showed itself in very pungent repartee, and an appearance which must have been indescribably comic, he soon attracted notice, "indeed was the courtiers' anvil to try their wits upon; and sometimes this anvil returned the hammers as hard knocks as it received, his bluntness repaying their abusiveness. He carried folly," says Fuller "(which the charitable called merriment), in his very face. The shape of his head had no promising form, being like a sugar-loaf inverted, with the little end before, as composed of fancy and memory, without any common sense." When a separate establishment was set up for the household of Prince Henry and his sister, the Princess Elizabeth, Coryate obtained some post of small emolument which brought him into familiar relations with all the eminent men of the time, who appear to have amused themselves greatly at his expense. Prince Henry had a certain regard for him, and allowed him a pension. Always provided that they made it worth his while, Coryate had no objection even to the courtiers playing practical jokes upon him. On one occasion they shut him up in a trunk, and introduced him in a masque at court, much to the delight of the spectators (Nichols, Progresses of James I, ii. 400). The incident is alluded to by Ben Jonson and other writers of the time. First travels It is probable that he inherited some little property on the death of his father, for within a year of that event he had determined to start on his travels. He sailed from Dover on 14 May 1608, and availing himself of the ordinary means of transit, sometimes going in a cart, sometimes in a boat, and sometimes on horseback, he passed through Paris, Lyons, and other French towns, crossed the Mont Cenis in a chaise à porteurs on 9 June, and, after visiting Turin, Milan, and Padua, arrived at Venice on the 24th. He stayed at Venice till 8 August, when he commenced his homeward journey on foot. He crossed the Splugen, passed through Coire, Zurich, and Basle, and thence sailed down the Rhine, stopping at Strasburg and other places, and reached London at last on 3 Octobr, having travelled, according to his own reckoning, 1,975 miles, the greater part of which distance he had covered on foot, and having visited in the space of 5 months 45 cities, "whereof in France five, in Savoy one, in Italy thirteen, in Rhœtia one, in Helvetia three, in some parts of High Germany fifteen, in the Netherlands seven."Jessopp, 260. The Crudities Notwithstanding the novelty of this strange expedition and the very large amount of valuable information which he had gathered in his travels, Coryate found it hard to get a bookseller who would undertake the publication of his journal; and as late as November 1610 it seemed doubtful whether it would be printed at all. But Coryate was not the man to be discouraged or to be easily turned from his purpose. He applied to every person of eminence whom he knew, and many whom he can scarcely have known at all, to write commendatory verses upon himself, his book, and his travels, and by his unwearied pertinacity and unblushing importunity contrived to get together the most extraordinary collection of testimonials which have ever been gathered in a single sheaf. More than 60 of the most brilliant and illustrious litterati of the time were among the contributors to this strange farrago, the wits vying with one another in their attempts to produce mock heroic verses, turning Coryate to solemn ridicule. Ben Jonson undertook to edit these amusing panegyrics, which actually fill 108 quarto pages. Prince Henry was applied to, to further the printing of the book, and the volume was published in quarto by W.Stansby? in 1611. With the commendatory verses and the posthumous poems of the author's father, George Coryate, it contained nearly 800 pages. The title ran: Coryats Crudities: Hastily gobled up in five moneths travells in France, Savoy, Italy, Rhetia comonly called the Grisons country, Helvetia alias Switzerland, &c., &c., together with "a most elegant Oration, first written in the Latine tongue by H. Kirchnerus … now distilled into English spirit through the Odcombian Limbecke;" and "Another, also composed by the Author of the former, in praise of travell in Germanie in particular." The book was illustrated by engravings on copper and steel, which have now become extraordinarily valuable. The folded frontispiece and the large and careful copperplate of Strasburg Cathedral are especially rare. Second travels In 1612 Coryate started again on his travels. Before doing so he repaired to his native place, and there delivered a valedictory oration at the market cross, announcing his intention of being absent for 10 years, and formally hanging up in the church at Odcombe the shoes in which he had walked from Venice. These shoes had already become celebrated, and appear in a droll woodcut, in which they are drawn bound together by a laurel wreath. They serve as an illustration of some humorous verses by Henry Peacham, author of the Complete Gentleman, among the "Panegyricke Verses" prefixed to the Crudities. The shoes were still hanging up in Odcombe Church at the beginning of the 18th century. Coryate sailed 1st to Constantinople; visited Greece and Asia Minor; got a passage from Smyrna to Alexandria; went up the Nile as far as Cairo, returned to Alexandria; proceeded to the Holy Land, which he traversed from the Dead Sea to the Lebanon; joined a caravan that was on its way to Mesopotamia; stood upon the mounds of Nimroud; thence made his way through Persia to Candahar; managed to reach Lahore; and arrived safely at Agra, where he was well received by the English merchants who had a "factory" there. He reached Agra in October 1616. During the 4 years that he had been in the East, Coryate had learned Persian, Turkish, and Hindustani. On one occasion falling in with Sir Thomas Roe, who was the English ambassador at the court of the Great Mogul, Coryate obtained an audience of the mighty potentate, and delivered an oration in Persian. He sent home letters to his friends from time to time as opportunity occurred. One set of them was published in 1616, entitled Letters from Asmere, the Court of the Great Mogul, to several Persons of Quality in England, in which, in a rather well drawn and well executed woodcut which serves as a frontispiece, he appears riding on an elephant. His last letter (Mr. Thomas Coriat to his Friends in England sendeth greeting, from Agra .... the last of October 1616) was printed in 1618. There are some other pieces of his in Purchas his Pilgrimes, published in 1625. He lived about a year after reaching Agra, but his constitution, naturally a very strong one, gave way under the hospitalities which were shown him when he came among his own countrymen once more in the Indian frontiers, and after receiving 1 or 2 serious warnings he died of "a flux" at Surat in December 1617. A humble tumulus marking the place of his burial was shown half a century afterwards. It is described in Sir Thomas Herbert's Travels (1634). Writing Considering how faithful and instructive an account of the chief cities of Europe during the 17th century is to be found in his narrative, and how simple and lucid his style is when he is not intentionally fooling, it is strange that Coryate's Crudities should not have been more continuously popular, and that the book should not have been reprinted in our own day. The book seems to have had a large sale. In fact it was the 1st, and for long remained the only, handbook for continental travel; and though the grotesque collection of commendatory verses went far to get for the work a character which it did not deserve of being only a piece of buffoonery from beginning to end, it is quite plain that there were those who soon got to see its value. His accounts of inscriptions, many of which are now lost, were valuable; and his accounts of Italian customs and manners were influential in England at a time when other aspects of Italian culture, such as the madrigal, had already been in vogue for more than 20 years. He is often credited with introducing the table fork to England, with "Furcifer" (Latin: fork-bearer, rascal) becoming one of his nicknames. His description of how the Italians shielded themselves from the sun resulted in the word "umbrella" being introduced into English.Michael Strachan, "Coryate, Thomas (c. 1577–1617)", in Literature of Travel and Exploration: an Encyclopedia, 2003, Volume 1, pp.285–87 Perhaps of no book in the English language of the same size and of the same age is it possible to say that there are not 2 perfect copies in existence. At the end of 1 of the British Museum copies is an autograph letter from Coryat to Sir Michael Hickes, dated "from my chamber in Bowelane this 15th November 1610," which was printed in Brydges's "Censura Literaria." Two appendices to the ‘Crudities,’ also issued in 1611, are equally rare. They are: Coryats Crambe; or, His Colwort twise sodden and now served in with other Macaronicke dishes as the second course to his Crudities, Lond. W. Stansby, 4to; and The Odcombian Banquet, dished foorth by T. the Coriat and served in by a number of Noble Wits in prayse of his Crudities and Crambe too. Imprinted for T. Thorp, London, 4to. Recognition The fame of Tom Coryate produced at least one imitator, even in his lifetime, in the person of William Lithgow. British travel writer and humorist Tim Moore retraced the steps of Coryat's tour of Europe, as recounted in his book Continental Drifter (2000). In 2008 Daniel Allen published an account of his 9-month cycle trip following Coryate's journey to the East, entitled The Sky Above, The Kingdom Below. Publications *''Coryat's Crudities: Hastily gobled up in five moneths travells. Glasgow: J. MacLehose & Sons, 1905. See also *List of British poets *John Sandford (poet) *William Stansby References * Wikisource, Web, Dec. 28, 2017. *Moraes, Dom and Sarayu Srivatsa. ''The Long Strider : How Thomas Coryate Walked From England to India in the Year 1613. New Delhi: Penguin, 2003. ISBN 0-670-04975-1. *Penrose, Boies. Urbane Travelers: 1591–1635. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1942. LCCN 42-019537. *Pritchard, R.E. Odd Tom Coryate: The English Marco Polo. Thrupp, Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2004. ISBN 0-7509-3416-6. *Strachan, Michael. The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryate. London: Oxford UP, 1962. LCCN 62-052512. *Chaney, Edward, "Thomas Coryate", Grove-Macmillan Dictionary of Art. *Chaney, Edward, The Evolution of the Grand Tour (2nd edition, London: Routledge, 2000. ISBN 0-7146-4474-9 *Moore, Tim 'The Grand Tour', St. Martin's Press, New York, 2001. ISBN 0-312-28156-0 *Allen, Daniel The Sky Above, The Kingdom Below. London, Haus, 2008. ISBN 1-905791-30-5 * Whittaker, David (ed.) 'Most Glorious & Peerless Venice: Observations of Thomas Coryate (1608)'. Wavestone Press, Charlbury, 2013. 978-09545194-7-6 (Contains the Venice section of the 'Crudities', with photographs by the editor.) Notes External links *Coryate, Thomas in the [[Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition|1911 ''Encyclopædia Britannica]] * Coryate, Thomas Category:1570s births Category:1617 deaths Category:People from Crewkerne Category:English travel writers Category:People educated at Winchester College Category:Deaths from dysentery Category:Infectious disease deaths in India Category:Alumni of Gloucester Hall, Oxford Category:16th-century English people Category:17th-century English people Category:People of the Tudor period Category:16th-century English writers Category:17th-century English writers Category:17th-century poets Category:English-language poets Category:English poets Category:Poets